In recognition of its environmental credentials, DS Smith Packaging has been honoured with three Green Apple Awards, as part of a campaign to find Britain’s greenest organisations.
Sites in Livingston and Lockerbie, Scotland, and a third in Plymouth, Devon, have been handed the awards for their work to reduce the environmental impact of their production processes.
They competed against more than 500 other nominations for the awards which are organised by The Green Organisation, an independent, non profit environment group dedicated to recognising and promoting environmental best practice.
The site at Lockerbie picked up a bronze award after achieving significant reductions in CO2 emissions and truck movements, thanks to simple but effective measures in terms of stacking and storage of pallets. By calculating the optimal height for a pallet to be double stacked, DS Smith was able to increase the amount in each lorry, reducing the number of trips, which led to annual CO2 savings of 14,060kg – the equivalent of cooking dinner on a gas ring every day for 767 years. There were also reductions in usage of packaging materials such as shrinkwrap and pallets.
DS Smith Packaging Livingston won a silver award after launching a project to simultaneously reduce the level of waste coming out of the site and the carbon footprint of the operation. This was achieved by encouraging best practice throughout the production process and installing more effective waste management systems. The result has been to reduce paper use, including 105 fewer deliveries from, and waste sent to, its main paper supplier. This alone has saved almost 95,000 miles on the road since 2008 – the equivalent of driving from John O’Groats to Land’s End 111 times, significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
DS Smith Packaging Boon – a sheet plant which processes corrugated sheets of board into various forms of packaging – won Gold for the reductions it achieved in energy and water consumption in its production processes. As water, electricity and gas were identified as the biggest resource at the factory, an initiative was launched to reduce levels of use and the second year of the project saw water consumption down by 6%, electricity reduced by 13%, and gas consumption down by 34%. The total energy savings made came to 58,000K Hh – the equivalent to the energy used by four three bedroom houses.
Tony Foster, sector director at DS Smith Packaging, said: ‘This triple award underlines DS Smith Packaging’s on-going commitment to reducing the environmental impact of our industrial processes. The Green Apple Awards are valuable because they focus attention on environmental best practice.
‘The work of our teams in Plymouth, Livingston and Lockerbie is worthy of recognition as they have achieved some significant results due to their commitment to waste reduction and innovative thinking.’
